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It's an astonishing 40 years since Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman formed their massively influential Byrds spinoff the Flying Burrito Brothers. Let's track back to the making of their seminal 1969 debut The Gilded Palace Of Sin--and its immediate aftermath.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

In the fall of 1968, Gram Parsons set about assembling his very own Rolling Stones--a country-soul-rock-gospel hybrid that would give proper vent to the music inside him. And who should join him in this enterprise but Chris Hillman, who like Parsons had jumped ship from the Byrds. "As time healed, we started talking again," Hillman says. "The Byrds had really fallen flat for me. Even after hiring Clarence White, I felt it wasn't going to go anywhere. So Gram and I patched it up and had this wonderful idea for the Flying Burrito Brothers."

Like Parsons, Hillman had separated from his wife, and the two bandless bachelors moved into a house in Reseda and began writing songs. For a good couple of months, Gram and Chris were a hive of industry, waking each morning and working at the songs that became The Gilded Palace Of Sin. Parsons listened to no contemporary music bar the Stones: it was either George Jones and Hank Williams or it was James Carr and Bobby "Blue" Bland.

With the enlistment of bassist Chris Ethridge and pedal steel guitarist "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow, who'd been playing with western swing bands since the mid-'50s, Parsons and Hillman finally had their dream band. At the end of the year, Gram and Chris signed a deal with A&M, a label desperate at this point to give itself a hip makeover. "Jerry [Moss] and Herb [Alpert] came in real fast and said, ‘Oh well, gee, you can start right away here, and we'll give you the equipment and stuff'."

Recorded speedily and released even faster, The Gilded Palace, was a wonderful album. The Parsons/Hillman originals were sublime: 'Christine's Tune' was about super-groupie Miss Christine of the GTOs, and 'Sin City' was a plangent ballad calling down Biblical wrath on the head of Hollywood Babylon. 'Hippie Boy' was a spoken-word sermon on Gram's favorite subject--the coming-together of rednecks and longhairs under the common banner of country music.

The cover of Aretha Franklin's 'Do Right Woman-Do Right Man,' with David Crosby singing harmony, was simply exquisite--like Aretha's original, a definition of country soul. "My introduction to country music was the Burritos," Elvis Costello told me in 1983, "yet here was a country rock band covering 'Do Right Woman' and James Carr's 'Dark End Of The Street'--just as Sweetheart has a version of William Bell's 'You Don't Miss Your Water'. So many eulogies of Gram have been written saying how important he was and how he crossed country with R&B, but I just liked the guy because he liked Aretha Franklin too, y'know?"

Maybe best of all was the gushingly devoted 'Hot Burrito #1', written by Gram with Chris Ethridge. Supposedly conceived as a hymn to Nancy, the song was Gram at his most tremulous and endearing. "I'm your toy, I'm your old boy/But I don't want no one but you to love me," he sang in the cracked, fragile tenor that would still melt hearts three years later. "He taught me a lot about relaxing when you sing," says Evan Dando. "He doesn't hurry anything. It's an otherworldly and addictive voice, and as soon as I heard it, it became what I aspired to from then on in. I think he's one of the best singers ever."

The most radical thing about Gram's songs was that they were never nostalgic for some quaint Appalachian past. Gram wasn't singing country music because he wanted to preserve tradition; he was simply using the idiom to do what any good singer-songwriter of the period was doing: talk about what was going on in his head and in the world around him. "His lyrics were revolutionary in the sense that, although on the surface like traditional country, they were the country equivalent of what Bob Dylan or Lou Reed did to pop-rock lyrics," says Sid Griffin. "Gram gave country a new catalogue of subjects: long hair, drugs, the city, Vietnam. He didn't play country rock to my mind, he played country with a rock and roll attitude."

With The Gilded Palace in the record stores--it would never rise any higher than #164 on the album chart--Chris Hillman managed to persuade fellow former Byrd Michael Clarke to become the band's drummer. A series of gigs was lined up on the club circuit in the Valley and North Hollywood, interspersed with shows at the Whisky A Go Go and the Troubadour. "I remember playing the Troub, and Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther would be watching Gram," says Hillman. "Glenn would watch him like he was studying him for a thesis. I think he was looking at the Burritos as this very raw, soulful, but loose aggregation of guys and thinking, 'We could do this but better.' Which they did, as a very successful, slick version of the Burritos."

Marginally more interesting were the Valley gigs, with Parsons dolled up like his new best mates the Rolling Stones. "It's funny when you look back at how he was wearing these outlandish scarves and doing this mild cross-dressing," says Hillman. "Here we are playing these redneck country bars where people just wanted to kill us. That along with the Nudie suits made it quite interesting for that one-year period." To Miss Mercy of the GTOs, Gram was "true glitter-glamour rock," a space cowboy with babyfaced sex appeal and a rhinestone suit that gleefully subverted the standard iconography of country and western performers with its nudes and pills and marijuana leaves.

Unfortunately for the Burritos' sakes, those New Best Friends happened to come to LA that October to mix Let It Bleed. (That album's 'Country Honk' could almost be described as a Gram Parsons remix of 'Honky Tonk Women'.) "The Rolling Stones came into town, and Gram went over to see them, and he never came back," laughs Eve Babitz. "He went over to the Chateau Marmont and degenerated into the quagmire of the Sunset Strip."

Following an insane, coke-fuelled fiasco of a tour that took the band by train to Chicago and the East Coast, Parsons began to tire of the Burritos. Moving out of the latest "Burrito Manor" on Beverly Glen Drive and into the Marmont, he began drinking heavily and no-showing at gigs. One night Gram took Linda Ronstadt up to visit their satanic majesties on the back on his Harley Davidson. "I couldn't leave until the next morning because he was too drunk to drive me home," she says with a haughty snort. "I was shocked by the fact that these people could sit up all night long, and I thought they were very careless. I wondered how on earth they managed to pull the music together."

"The Burritos had taken off pretty well," says Hillman, "but when Gram sought the Stones out during the 'Honky Tonk Women' period, he really got seduced by all the trappings at that point. Here was a kid with a lot of talent but zero discipline. He did not work at his craft. Suddenly he had one foot in country music and the other the rock 'n' roll glamour world, and we started to lose him.

"One night, Gram was hanging out with the Stones and I couldn't find him, and we had a show to do. And I finally tracked him down to the studio and he was goofing around, and I said we had a show to do. He was like, 'Oh, I don't wanna do it, yabber yabber yabber...' and Mick got in his face and said, 'You have a responsibility, to Chris and the rest of your bandmates, so get moving! We're busy here!' It was a fabulous insight into Jagger the consummate professional."

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